The Encyclopaedia Metallum is the definitive central reference source for most metal-related matters. It has, in addition to its encyclopedic factual content, tens of thousands of percentage-scored, user-attributed, peer-moderated reviews of metal recordings. What it does not have is any sort of similarity analysis to make use of the huge data-graph represented by the connections between bands, users and ratings. There is a wearyingly mundane reason for this, too: trying to do similarity analysis with SQL queries will make you want to eat your own neck.

So here is a small contribution to the world's knowledge on this admittedly peripheral subject, the missing similarity analysis of EM user/review/band data:

Pick a band, see the other bands that people who like the first band also like.

Data wants to form shapes. In a better world, this would be just as easy for EM to do themselves, updating live, as it is for them to serve their raw data into web pages. If I do my day-job well enough, eventually everyone will have better tools. I'm not designing them to tabulate heavy metal, I'm designing them to answer questions. Not all answers turn out to be shaped like Truths, of course. But if you can't answer them, you can't be sure which are which.

]]>Fri, 27 Mar 2015 00:00:00 EDT

Every Noise at Once is an inexorably expanding universe of music-processing experiments, starting with a dynamic attempt at a map of all the major genres of music in the world.

20 Covers was won by Jer Fairall with 39 of 60 possible points (and only one incorrect guess, although there were no penalties for those). Very honorable mention to Paul Cowan and friends, in second place with 33 points. I apologize for the mean trick in 6 and 7, and for the inexplicable "alphabetization" of "Belle & Sebastian" before "Bee Gees". Judging from the overall nature of the responses, I probably made this one a bit too difficult, but in the end the only track that no respondents identified any component of was Rush's Yardbirds cover.

The above mp3 file is an audio collage of 20 rather short clips from unidentified cover songs, most of them fairly recent. The challenge was to name each song, the artist performing this version, and the artist responsible for the original version. All tactics were permissible. Some of the songs and performers are fairly well-known, some are not. The clips are in alphabetical order by original author, although in a couple cases "original author" is a little ambiguous, and I accepted any defensible answer.

The contest is over, but see what you can figure out on your own before you look at the results and answers.

]]>Tue, 12 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EDT

An elimination tournament does not, by its nature, produce overall standings. You can construct a table by points, of course, but it will not take into account the differences in games played and opponents' strengths. I wanted, just for fun, to devise an objective (which doesn't mean meaningful) way to rate and rank the 32 teams in the World Cup. After several iterations, here's the scheme I came up with.

For each team I calculated a raw efficiency rating based on their points per game. At 3 points for a win, 1 for a tie and none for a loss, with 2 bonus points for making it to the elimination stage, I added up each team's points, divided by an expected point total of 4/3 * games-played (figuring an average result for three round-robin games would have been a win, a tie and a loss), and then added 1, anticipating later multiplication, so that the resulting ratings start at 1 instead of 0.

I then went back and used those ratings as a measure of opponent's strength, assigning each match for each team the product of the points gained (again 1-base (4/2/1) rather than 0-base (3/1/0)) and the opponent's raw rating. Add those values up and average them, and then add a 1-point bonus for making it to the elimination stage. This approach takes no account of goals for or against, and does not make any attempt at incorporating any information (like FIFA rankings) from outside the tournament. Nonetheless, it produces the following interesting set of adjusted ratings:

1

Brazil

10.12

2

Germany

7.92

3

Turkey

7.59

4

Spain

7.47

5

South Korea

7.45

6

England

6.87

7

USA

6.53

8

Mexico

6.15

9

Senegal

6.05

10

Japan

5.81

11

Denmark

5.63

12

Belgium

5.58

13

Ireland

5.24

14

Italy

5.18

15

Sweden

5.13

16

Poland

4.59

17

Paraguay

4.51

18

Croatia

4.31

19

Costa Rica

4.23

20

Argentina

4.04

21

Portugal

3.99

22

Ecuador

3.94

23

Cameroon

3.85

24

South Africa

3.78

25

Uruguay

3.40

26

Russia

3.33

27

Nigeria

3.10

28

Tunisia

3.02

29

France

2.73

30

China

2.69

31

Saudi Arabia

2.41

32

Slovenia

2.41

Since all that math was totally arbitrary, there is no reason to believe these numbers mean anything, but I'm surprised how well they seem to accord with my subjective intuition. And the table passes the obvious sanity checks: the top and bottom are right, South Korea is penalized a little bit for playing and losing an extra game, almost (but not quite) all the second-round teams come in ahead of the teams that were eliminated in the first, and France barely edges out the three teams that didn't gain any points.

So I'm going with it. As far as I'm concerned, the US is now temporarily the 7th best men's soccer nation on the planet.

]]>Thu, 04 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Katie Roiphe's speculative Charles Dodgson character-portrait, Still She Haunts Me, is deftly executed and intriguingly imagined, but I'll admit that I got to the end without discerning the point of the exercise, and am left wondering if it wasn't just a clever way for a scholar to produce a novel without actually having to think of a story to tell. In a sense I wonder the same thing about Elizabeth Wurtzel's addiction saga More, Now, Again, which preempts criticism of its story structure by labeling itself a memoir. Of the two approaches, scholarly abstraction and personal evisceration, I guess I prefer the latter. Technically Elizabeth's book is non-fiction, and Katie's is fiction, but Elizabeth's is the story in which the resolution is in doubt, and thus the one I more readily see the purpose of telling. More, Now, Again has gotten a number of appallingly antagonistic reviews, including one with the cruel headline "Oops, I Did It Again", but it seems to me most of the criticisms are misplaced. It's true, this is Wurtzel's second memoir, after Prozac Nation, and both of them involve addled mental states and compensatory chemicals, but Prozac Nation is about overcoming clinical depression, and More, Now, Again is about overcoming voluntary drug addiction. Far from repeating or devaluing Prozac Nation, in fact, for me More, Now, Again turns it into the first chapter of a much more interesting story it took Elizabeth twenty years to live and two books to tell. Prozac Nation ended tentatively, with a survived suicide attempt and that inexplicable day when the drugs started working and Elizabeth woke up not wanting to kill herself. It was an uneasy conclusion, so it comes as no great surprise, I think, when More, Now, Again picks up a few years later and finds Elizabeth's mental state fraying again. Exactly as the epilogue to Prozac Nation worried, drugs may not be sustainable answers. Elizabeth's Ritalin regimen turns into a debilitating amphetamine addiction with an associated cocaine habit, and the story follows her out of control, into rehab, through a relapse and finally to a hard-won clean that has now, if we decide to believe her, lasted just a little over two years. Answering questions at a reading in Cambridge, Elizabeth claimed that there will not be any more memoirs, that two detailed confessions of personal trauma and folly are enough for any one person. I think there is at least one more to come. Prozac Nation chronicled a war fought in the belief that Elizabeth's problems, and by extension anybody's, are amenable to chemical solutions. More, Now, Again reveals how fragile those chemical solutions often are, and begins to develop what might be more productive and personal theories for her behavior and fears. This second chapter ends with her finishing drug treatment, but recognizing that she is at a beginning, not a conclusion. Much of her therapy, especially towards the end of the story, has pressed on her attitudes toward romance and external affirmation, and when the book ends she is single. This story isn't over. I expect she'll write something different, next, and maybe two or three something-differents, but I believe there will be a third memoir. In Prozac Nation I thought Elizabeth made herself seem fairly awful, but this time she treats her own character with a little more compassion, and by the end I find myself wanting good things for her, and agreeing with her that she might almost be ready to deal with them. I believe the trilogy must end with a love story.

]]>Thu, 14 Feb 2002 00:00:00 EST

40 Covers was won, decisively, by Aaron Mandel, with a borderline-terrifying 117 of 120 possible points. He correctly identified all 40 songs and original artists, failing only to identify the perfomers of clips 2 (no guess), 39 (guessed Roxette themselves) and 40 (guessed Truly). Honorable mentions go to Scott Parkerson (94 points), Ian Ireland (84) and Aaron Goldschmidt (76). The full answer list is as follows, with the performers and sources in parentheses. Note that in the few cases where "original artist" was arguably ambiguous, I accepted any answer that demonstrated that the contestant had the right song in mind. There was no penalty for guesses or wrong answers, just a point for every piece you got right.

The above mp3 file is an audio collage of 40 clips from unidentified cover songs. The challenge was to try to figure out the song titles, the original artists and the performers in the clips for as many of them as you could, using any resources at your disposal. The contest is now done, but if you didn't participate, you're encouraged to try it for yourself to see how you would have done before reading the results and answers.

]]>Thu, 05 Apr 2001 00:00:00 EDT

In the dream, I am aboard a 747 returning from Singapore. What I was doing in Singapore is not specified, and indeed I have no sense that I was in Singapore, just that I'm on a plane returning from it. I am traveling in no official capacity, but somehow I know that this flight is primarily functioning to transport the singer Lil' Kim and her press entourage. At some point early in the trip, Lil' Kim's manager comes out of first class and asks which journalist wants to be first to interview the singer. There is an uncomfortable silence. Apparently the journalists are afraid of her. Just wanting to be helpful, I raise my hand and say "I'll interview her." I am promptly escorted in and seated across from her. I start to say something, but Lil' Kim's manager interrupts me and explains that first they want to know my favorite bands, which seems reasonable enough. "Tori Amos, Big Country...", I begin listing, provoking an immediate exchange of exasperated glances between Lil' Kim and her manager, as if to bemoan the fact that yet again they've been assigned a journalist who doesn't like rap. "Hey," I point out, "I'm not a reporter, I just agreed to interview you to get things moving." This seems to placate them, so I go ahead and ask the first question of the interview. A woman seated to my left begins to answer it, and Lil' Kim, in front of me, snaps "I can answer for myself!" Looking at these two women, it finally registers that the one on my left, the Lil' Kim I recognize from posters (actually, in the dream she looks more like Rosie Perez, I assume because in waking life I wouldn't recognize Lil' Kim unless her name was visible tattooed on her naked abdomen), is obviously a paid body-double, while the one in front of me, the actual singer, is a pale, slightly mousy young white woman with short red hair. Before I really have time to contemplate the implications of this, however, or to place the vaguely familiar woman, the dream ends.

The next day, awake, is Tuesday. By the time I get to the record store in the evening, I have forgotten all about the dream. I walk in, go over to the New Releases rack, and pick up the first thing I need, idly flipping it over to look at the track listing. And there, on the back, unmistakable even though only half of her face is clearly visible, is the exact woman from the dream. It is Jonatha Brooke.

]]>Thu, 15 Feb 2001 00:00:00 EST

The great irony under which the RIAA's attacks on Napster labor, to me, is that the major labels are really now just paying the logical price for having promoted musicians as interchangeable cartoon figures, and thus bred shallow, fickle listeners with no sense of ethical responsibility. But siding with Napster, however appealing, is inane for two reasons. First, Napster is at heart a system invented by resourceful college students for using the good computers their parents bought them, running on the good networks their parents and/or our taxes paid for, to get music for free, since neither their parents nor the government will buy them all the CDs they want. Napster is no revolution. A real revolution against the music business would consist of people searching out and supporting independent artists and musical styles that haven't been drummed into their heads over shopping mall PA systems and on the soundtracks to demographically-engineered TV shows. Napster is just letting people pirate the crap they're supposed to be buying, and it's thus an argument about money, not music, greed in the name of fighting greed, like stealing the tea off the docks in Boston and taking it home, instead of dumping it into the harbor. If Napster really cared about the nonsense revolution they claim to be leading, they'd just sacrifice themselves and let the next, cleverer, more elusive version of the same idea take over. Napster, the company, is only fighting so hard because they convinced some venture capitalists to give them a lot of money, and now they have to try to make it into more money. There's your noble David-vs-Goliath struggle for you: music-business accountants against high-technology bankers, fighting over exactly how you're to be allowed to listen to mass-produced music that isn't worth fighting over to begin with.

The other bad defense for Napster is that technology can't be stopped, so it's wrong to even try. Logically speaking, this isn't much different from saying that now that we have guns, people are bound to shoot each other, so making laws against it is an exercise in narrow-minded futility. Or that it's pointless to stop people from speeding, since it's so easy and enjoyable to make a car go fast. There are lots of things that we make stands against, in law, even though they're easy to do, and music piracy is far from the most harmless of them, so these lawsuits should surprise nobody. Can the RIAA sue every new tool for clandestine MP3 distribution out of existence? No, but they don't need to. They'll sue two or three and win easily, establishing the precedents, and then lobby for new laws to encode those court victories, and pass the enforcement problem over to the government. You'll still be able to pirate MP3s, like you're still able to buy and sell marijuana. But you'll know that it's illegal, and you won't like the consequences if you get caught.

Of course, that said, if the music business weren't run by lawyers, they'd have realized by now that the most efficient way to bury Napster and all its derivatives isn't to sue or criminalize them, it's to render them irrelevant. The second-greatest irony of this whole mess is that Sony wouldn't have to try very hard to do a ten times better job of getting Sony music to people than Napster does. Three decent web programmers and a room or two of interns could have the whole Sony catalog online, attractively and coherently presented, neatly indexed and reliably available, in a month or two. (They need to do this, anyway, for non-retail purposes; I hereby predict that mainstream radio and Muzak will have gone entirely electronic by the morning of 2 March 2006.) Most of the web sites are there, in fact, they're just missing the MP3 files. Let people download this week's hits for free, and then sell them a subscription that gives them access to the whole catalog. Or sell subscriptions to the new stuff, and give away anything older than a year, since nobody remembers it anyway. Better yet, the major labels can follow cable-TV's lead and sell one subscription that covers them all at once. The average person probably didn't buy more than a dozen or two CDs per year, even before Napster supposedly altered their buying habits (note to survey takers: asking people whether they plan to buy more music now that they've started stealing it is a waste of telephony packets), and the cost of producing download subscriptions will be lower than the cost of producing physical CDs, so they can probably afford to set the price so low that writing software to get around it will just seem petty. Who wouldn't pay twenty dollars a month to be able to download any song ever released on a major label, any time you want to, from fast, easy to use, well-organized and reliable servers, without any ethical remorse (or, for the ethically oblivious, fear of punishment)? The kids get an infinite supply of music for less than they currently spend on things they don't even like as much, the labels get more money from each of them than they were probably making already, and all the music mailing lists can go back to talking about movies and educational policy, instead of debating intellectual-property law.

And what becomes of old-fashioned CDs, and of all the music that doesn't belong to major labels? Some of the smaller labels will try to join in, but they'll quickly discover that distribution isn't the choke-point in the system, it's still attention. It doesn't matter how fast March and Drive-In's servers are, virtually nobody knows they're there, and they aren't going to find out, for exactly the same reason they haven't found out before now. Reliable mass awareness is massively expensive. Once the small labels realize that they're still stuck with the same niche audience they had yesterday, they may realize that the business they ran yesterday still works, to the extent it ever did. I like CDs. I like 45s, for that matter. I buy hardback books, even though I'm so far behind that by the time I get around to reading them they'll already be out in paperback. I go to the theater to see movies I could watch for free on television in six months. I'm willing to pay for these things. If I'm representative, the small-label CD business needn't change at all.

But am I? For the time being, anyway, MP3 fidelity is still much too low for people who really care about music to take it seriously as an alternative to CDs. Another generation or two of compression algorithms and/or bandwidth improvements will solve that, though. (And DVD-Audio and Super Audio CDs are only ways of stalling, even if I'm wrong about 44.1 kHz CD audio being sufficient for human ears.) And then will downloading be so convenient that people who like to hold objects in their hands no longer constitute an economy of scale? Major labels, I think, would love that. The music business has wanted to be the TV business for decades, and switching from shipping to broadcasting will get them halfway there. All the retail book and record stores, of course, will have to close. Same with the movie theaters, when movies follow suit. Same, if we really don't care whether our experiences have tactility, with office buildings and restaurants and roads. Maybe I'm in a hopeless minority, and we will become a shut-in nation, content with nutrient vats and neural taps. If you think that way lies cultural sophistication and a freedom from corporate media hegemony, though, then the corporatists have tricked you into pirating their meme. This is not a noble battle between the anonymous crush of industry and the rights of people, it's a small monster teaching a big monster its next tricks.

]]>Thu, 03 Aug 2000 00:00:00 EDT

The Story of Us is not a very good movie. I think Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer do some fairly credible acting, but they seem to be performing the admittedly-ill-advised interview segments under protest, and the whole thing is edited like one of those "best of" episodes lame sitcoms run when they want to kill a week near the end of the season without paying the writers and actors any more for it, which totally undermines any momentum, subtlety or emotional power the performances might have had. But I see lots of bad movies, and I've seen plenty that had fewer redeeming qualities than this one.

I can't remember the last time, however, that a movie spent so much effort inexorably building up to an ending that it doesn't deliver. Did anybody involved in making this film actually watch it? Look at all the details available to exploit:

1. The parents work so hard to hide their problems from their kids, but of course the kids know the truth.

2. Not only does the existence of the kids hold their parents together, but the daughter, at least, is actively trying to hold them together.

3. Katie complains that Ben is always Harold in their relationship, and she never gets to draw with the magic purple crayon.

4. His proposal was done with a purple crayon, literally, as was her acceptance.

5. The pivotal scene of their ability to communicate was a stealth game of hangman, played under a restaurant table while they pretended to take part in a trivial conversation.

6. Their favorite restaurant is a low-brow Chinese place; her dalliance with the dentist involves a high-brow Thai cooking class.

7. During one of the scenes where the voice-over is just beginning to reach an epiphany, shortly after Ben has given up on writing his grandmother's storybook romance, he is shown feverishly working on some new idea.

8. When Ben comes over to dinner, deliberate emphasis is placed on the absence of books on "his" bedside table.

9. Ben makes a point of telling Katie that he tried to do one of her puzzles, having previously shown (or feigned) a lack of interest in her work.

10. Both the title of the film, and the interview sessions, beg for a self-referential explanation.

11. The kids are away for the whole summer, leaving plenty of time for plot developments requiring slow realizations and/or long labors.

12. The family conversation game, High-Low, consists of saying the best and worst thing that happened to you recently.

The ending in the film takes advantage of exactly none of these. There's a tearful conversation in the parking lot (which the kids, despite the fact that they're sitting twenty feet away in a car with the windows open, apparently don't hear or even notice), Ben and Katie suddenly agree to get back together, and then the movie ends, as if we're expected to have totally forgotten that we've already seen at least six apparently-sincere near-reunions that fell apart minutes later. This movie was never going to be a classic, no matter how it ended, but it would have been at least ten times better if it had paid attention to its own internal logic:

All summer, off by himself, Ben has been writing. When he comes over to pick up his shirts (a scene which should be moved to take place the night before they go pick up the kids), after they have the fight and Katie storms out of the bedroom, he pulls out the finished manuscript, which he'd meant to present to Katie with fanfare, and just leaves it on the empty bedside table. Katie finds it later, after he's left, and angrily picks it up and goes to throw it in a closet. Except there in the closet is some key piece of relationship memorabilia (the hangman pad?), which makes her pause. After some standard will-she-won't-she mock-suspense, she retrieves the manuscript and stays up all night reading it. The final line, which we see her linger on, is "Are we an us?". By morning she's exhausted and thoroughly confused, but they head off to meet the kids, still planning to take them home and announce the break-up. The daughter, however, seeing the state her mother is in, immediately figures out what's going on, and stages a desperate scene claiming to have a summer-fueled craving for the favorite family Chinese food. The parents accede. At the restaurant Ben, clowning for the kids, makes a comment about the simple greasy goodness of the food that contrasts with some pretentious crap the dentist said earlier about Thai food, and Katie flinches thoughtfully. The combination of this and being reunited with her wonderful kids finally convinces her that they should stay together. But she can't just come out and tell Ben, because they're in a noisy restaurant and trying to keep up the nothing-is-amiss facade. She searches frantically in her purse for a pen, thinking she's doing so surreptitiously, but the daughter notices and offers her, under the table, an intensely symbolic purple crayon (maybe it's one of those restaurants that gives kids paper placemats to color on?). Using the crayon and a napkin, Katie makes up a hangman puzzle, which Ben then tries to figure out while carrying on a seemingly normal conversation (made easier by the fact that the kids know he's not paying attention to them, and so are playing along to sustain the illusion that he's sustaining the illusion for them). The original hangman message was something like "I hate the Brodys", or whatever the horrible couple's names were, and if Katie just saw the hangman pad again in the closet, this will be fresh in the audience's minds, so this message, which Ben finally deciphers, is a parallel "I love the Jordans". Hope flares up in his eyes, and he flips the napkin over and does his own hangman puzzle for her, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _. Without even making a formality of guessing, she writes in "Are we an us?", and then adds the same Yup and Nope checkboxes from his crayon-written proposal, and hands it back to him. He checks "Yup". Just then, the daughter demands that they play "High-Low". The parents go first, and give some vague answers that the kids are supposed to think are just sappy and routine, but which really reflect their renewed love. Then it's the daughter's turn, and for her High she says "Whatever you two just said on that napkin." Cue adorable group hug. And finally, as an epilogue, we go back to the interview, and the camera pulls back and reveals that Ben and Katie are on a talk show, or something, promoting the now-published book with which he won her back, which is called, of course, The Story of Us.

]]>Thu, 14 Oct 1999 00:00:00 EDT

I believe that the tobacco industry is surreptitiously subsidizing the making of movies with favorable portrayals of cigarette smoking. Usually Occam's Razor is the only tool you need to disassemble these sorts of hypotheses, but I haven't managed to cut this one up yet. From the tobacco companies' point of view, it makes almost perfect sense: their outlets for conventional advertising are drastically constrained by law, and there are next to no celebrities willing to formally endorse a carcinogenic addiction, but there are no restrictions at all placed on the depiction of smoking in movies, and no shortage of actors willing to help define a sense of cool with cigarettes at its center. We laughed, back in college, when we watched Now, Voyager in one of my film-studies classes, at all the dramatic romantic scenes that revolved around cigarettes, but after seeing Henry Fool, Whatever and Polish Wedding in quick succession, I can no longer recall why the smoking in Now, Voyager seemed anachronistic. One could argue that the smoking in Henry Fool, like the drinking and the sex, is intended to emphasize the self-destructive amorality of the characters, and Whatever at least makes an issue out of it, but the ever-present haze in Polish Wedding is used, completely without apology or caveat, as a convenient medium for family bonding, as if the characters would have flown kites together if there was more open space in their neighborhood, or played Scrabble if any of them could spell or read, but have fallen back on smoking cigarettes for purely logistical reasons. It's fantastically infuriating and depressing: all the Surgeon General warnings, health-care-expense lawsuits and Joe Camel injunctions in the world are likely to accomplish nothing as long as people can, without any risk of repercussions, make movies that show young children smoking, pregnant girls smoking, parents smoking, and parents condoning the smoking of young children and pregnant girls and each other. Polish Wedding features Claire Danes, whose acting career is based on playing one of the most thoughtful fifteen-year-olds in modern fiction, smoking cigarettes with apparent relish, and I can't remember the last time a single scene in a movie filled me with such violent disgust. Who do you think the next generation of tobacco-industry marketing targets are going to trust, an ex-Surgeon General who looks like an Amish Wilford Brimley, or Angela? If we truly cared about our children and ourselves, we wouldn't put up with this. Smoking is bad. It's bad for the person doing it, it's bad for the people around them, it's bad for society as a whole. It combines the worst qualities of selfishness, suicide and procrastination. If you smoke, you should stop. This is a really simple issue. Quitting is hard, but so are lots of things. If this country had any convictions at all, we'd toss every last tobacco-company executive in jail for five times the length of their industry career, use their fields as a convenient dumping ground for all the napalm we've got left over from Vietnam, confiscate their non-tobacco divisions and turn them over to Junior Achievement, sponsor a pampered week in detox for anybody who needs it, ask Zippo politely to think of some other lovable pocket gadget to manufacture, and get on with facing all the problems that have some challenging ambiguity to them. The fact that we haven't done this yet is attributable to exactly two things: human weakness and corporate profits. If there are clearer examples of the systemic flaw of capitalism as a social organizing principle, or sadder jokes than the "No Smoking" signs on the theater doors, I can't currently think of them.

]]>Thu, 06 Aug 1998 00:00:00 EDT

Back in June, Harper's Magazine published a short letter cleverly assembled out of small pieces of a wildly overlong letter I wrote them, trying to defend pop music against an article in the March issue that bothered me too much to leave alone. I'm not a letter-to-the-editor hobbyist, really I'm not, but in September Harper's ran a piece about using software agents and collaborative filtering to recommend books and music to people, a subject in which I have personal and professional stakes, and I felt compelled to say something again. This time, though, I made a conscious effort to keep the note short and focused, with the goal not only of getting it printed, but of getting it printed whole. Here's how close I got. My version is on the left, theirs on the right, with the bits that appear in only one of the versions in red, brighter where there's conceivably semantic import. The first sentences are mainly different because the letter they printed above mine had already provided the full citation.

Love, Your Agent
a letter to Harper's Magazine, 15 September 98
Sadly, Steven Johnson's example scenario, in "The Soul Encoded" [September], of an obscure new book finding a large audience through snowballing software-agent endorsements, is as unlikely as it is hopeful. For every hidden treasure that reaches ten passionate supporters through word of mouth, there will always be a dozen or two massively-promoted behemoths that can afford to recruit ten thousand earnest initial advocates. Manipulating collaborative filtering is just a matter of manipulating the collaborators, which is exactly what the big media companies are already best at.
But even if agents did have the potential to change the way we explore, why would we want them to? What is the point of art if not to form a vast human conversation? Perhaps there are a hundred books "just like" The Princess Bride that a perfect agent could direct me to, but none of them were sent to me by my girlfriend, away at boarding school, when I was sixteen. Where is the agent when I'm done with the book, breathless and desperate to talk about what it could mean for us? Our debates about art are our love letters to each other, and a machine for reading love letters, while a neat technological trick, would be as pointless and ultimately debilitating as an oven that eats our dinner for us.glenn mcdonald
Cambridge, MA

YourSoul.com
Letters, Harper's Magazine, December 1998
Sadly, Johnson's scenario of an obscure new book finding a large audience through snowballing software-agent endorsements, is as unlikely as it is hopeful.¶
For every hidden treasure that reaches ten passionate supporters through word of mouth, there will always be the massively promoted behemoths that can afford to recruit ten thousand earnest initial advocates. (Manipulating collaborative filtering is just a matter of manipulating the collaborators.)
But even if agents did have the potential to change the way we explore, why would we want them to? What is the point of art if not to form a vast human conversation? Perhaps there are a hundred books "just like" The Princess Bride that a perfect agent could direct me to, but none of them were sent to me by my girlfriend, away at boarding school, when I was sixteen. Where is the agent when I'm done with the book, breathless and desperate to talk about what it could mean for us?
Glenn McDonald
Cambridge, Mass.

]]>Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

Did you ever wonder, reading letters to the editor, what "edited for length" meant, exactly? I always did, and when Harper's, this month, published parts of the letter I wrote them, in a fit of irritation, after reading Thomas Frank's essay "Pop Music in the Shadow of Irony" in the March 1998 issue, I got to find out. The letter is much too long for them to have printed it all, even if they'd wanted to, and I'm very pleased they printed any of it, but I still think the process is fascinating. My version on the left, theirs on the right, with the common sections color-coded to show the derivation.

Music Criticism in the Shadow of Itself
a letter to Harper's Magazine, 28 February 98

I'm having a bad Damark-catalog experience with this month's Harper's. The stuff in the Damark catalog about which I know nothing, burglar alarms and radar detectors and the like, always looks eminently plausible, and generously priced, but then I turn to a page of computers or stereo equipment or something in a field where I actually know what they're talking about, and I realize that they're attempting to sell castoff junk at negligible discounts by coating it with a gleaming varnish of inane hyperbolic evasions. So Ronald Glasser's piece on managed health care, which I know next to nothing about, seems sensible to nearly the point of self-evidence. Popular music, however, I do know a little about, enough to recognize at least six major things wrong with Thomas Frank's disdainful jab at it:

1. It's possible to scrutinize a hit and figure out, in retrospect, the ingredients of its success, but things that fail fail for a thousand arbitrary reasons, and it's pointless to try to blame failure on anything in particular. There are hundreds of musicians with as "real and prodigious" skills as Chris Holmes whose careers are following essentially the same trajectories, and whose harebrained schemes for world domination could have been substituted for Chris' in this article without the smallest alteration in meaning. Most albums sell a few copies and then vanish; most things in any overpopulated field will fail, victims of the simplest principles of statistics. Condemning music because Chris Holmes isn't a rock star, and Time fails to mention him in an aside about Burt Bacharach, is like condemning government because the most charismatic guy you knew in your high school isn't President.

2. People who write about music in magazines and newspapers (and online columns) are painfully irrelevant to the end of the music business where serious money is made. Enormous successes ride on the purchasing power of people who don't pay much attention to music at all. They don't read reviews (even the ones in Time), they don't ponder the relation between the song they're humming and the decade of musical development that resulted in it, and they don't even buy that many CDs. Alanis Morissette sold millions of albums because people who only buy three or four albums a year bought hers among them. The media saturation that leads music critics to declare a movement at an end isn't too much coverage in magazines, it's too much exposure on radio and TV, over which they exert no influence at all. Picking on Christopher John Farley for writing about Pearl Jam in 1993 and the death of Alternative in 1996 is stupid and petty; what was he supposed to write about? If you only ever write one article about music for Harper's, of course, you run no risk of contradicting or repeating yourself, but if you write about music regularly, you're going to end up chronicling the rises and falls of genres. Alternative came, and people wrote about it, and then it went, and people wrote about that. That's how writers make a living. They parrot Chris' self-serving press releases the same way harried writers cannibalize press releases in every other field of endeavor, not because they are caught in the grip of Holmes' brilliance, but half because they want to be part of something heady and important and half because they're just in a hurry.

3. If there's any way to get into Frank's good graces other than being a personal acquaintance of his, he doesn't reveal it in the article. Chris Holmes' bands, those of his friends (I like the Pulsars' album, too, but it recycles Eighties synth-pop as baldly as Frank accuses Alternative of quoting the Seventies), and a couple bands Frank liked in college are about the only artists or styles in the whole piece that aren't offhandedly dismissed. Whatever the individual virtues of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Jane's Addiction, Everclear, Cracker, Oasis, Neil Diamond, Hot Chocolate, Possum Dixon, Alanis Morissette, krautrock, indie rock, lounge, low-fi, Alternative, Boston, Foghat, Molly Hatchet and the Lilith Fair tour are or aren't, panning them all in a uniformly jaded tone of indifference that implies that no thinking person would consider dissenting is facile, ignorant and condescending enough that I don't see why I should take anything else Frank says about music any more seriously than I took Allan Bloom's wildly uninformed diatribe against pop (in which Michael Jackson appeared to be the only practitioner with which he was familiar) in The Closing of the American Mind. The people who disassembled Frank's rosy vision of Kansas City's jazz past are idiots, but Robert Altman is "pathetic" for trying to make a film about it. There seems to be no credit available for effort. Anybody who adopts a style they weren't born with is a faker, and anybody who tries to do something real is merely "peddling authenticity".

4. Frank's good side isn't very appealing, either. For all the superlatives he heaps on Chris Holmes, I'm not left with a very favorable impression by his descriptions. His retreat into third-level in-jokes by the second album reminds me of nothing so much as all the bad writers in my college fiction seminars whose second short-story was a parody of a fiction seminar. I'll trade you ten of these smug, small-world snipers for one artist who tries to make something new any day, whether the attempt succeeds or fails. If Holmes is such a genius, why isn't he helping pop out of the frozen sea into which the article's illustration portrays it as having fallen, instead of squatting on his own tiny raft, ridiculing the people trying to climb onto some floating piece of the wreckage?

5. Moreover, only a cultural critic or a music-business executive (or Plato on Prozac) would say "peddling authenticity", as if the closest art can come to real is a glib simulation of it, and all purportedly real things are so semantically equivalent that there's no reason to differentiate between them. There's a neat internal consistency to this attitude, and it's not without McLuhan-esque insight, but it's like throwing out a letter without opening it on the theory that the meta-message of correspondence is all the writer intended to convey. If you actually read your letters, or listen to music, you'll find that "authenticity" is a means, not an end. The Spice Girls are selling female independence, loyalty and sugary charm; Nirvana sold pain and defiance; Alanis Morissette sells fury and resilience. People who buy their records thoughtfully (in addition to the hordes who buy them without thought) do so not because they "seem real", but because they really seem independent, or defiant, or resilient. The details matter.

6. The surest telltale sign of this article's counterfeit insight, though, like the computer ads in the Damark catalog that trumpet the voltages of their power supplies as prominently as the speed of their processors, is that it dwells on mundane footnotes and ignores the most inspiring realities. Sure, most of pop music is crap, and some of the most brilliant makers never get rich, but most of everything is crap, and the best artists are almost never millionaires. As with any other medium, finding the good stuff takes time, enthusiasm and diligence, and a little willingness to give some of the borderline cases the benefit of the doubt. If you care enough to do these things, though, then you'll find -- and here I'm only reporting on my own experience, but that's also true about thermodynamics and gravity -- that the best music being made today is as astonishing and life-affirming as any other age's. Ingrown irony does cast a shadow over pop music, like innumerable other maladies have cast shadows over parts of popular art throughout its history, but the only people standing in the shadow, shivering and issuing grim pronouncements about the imminent heat-death of the world now that the sun no longer exists, are critics without the energy or inclination to go somewhere where the light isn't impeded.

glenn

It's Only Rock and Roll
Letters, Harper's Magazine, June 1998

If there's any way to get into Frank's good graces other than by being a personal acquaintance, he doesn't reveal it in his article about pop music. Chris Holmes's bands, those of his friends, and a couple of bands Frank liked in college are about the only ones in the whole piece that aren't offhandedly dismissed. Whatever the individual virtues of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Jane's Addiction, Oasis, krautrock, indie rock, lounge, low-fi, Alternative, Boston, Foghat, Molly Hatchet, and the Lilith Fair, panning them all in a uniformly jaded tone of indifference that implies that no thinking person would consider dissenting is facile, ignorant and condescending.

Of course it's possible to scrutinize a hit and figure out, in retrospect, the ingredients of its success, but things that fail fail for a thousand arbitrary reasons, and it's pointless to try to blame failure on anything in particular. There are hundreds of musicians with "real and prodigious" talents whose careers follow essentially the same trajectory as Holmes's, and whose harebrained schemes for world domination could have played the same role in Frank's article.

Sure, most of pop music is crap, and most albums fail as a matter of course, victims of the simplest statistical laws. As with any other medium, finding the good stuff takes time, enthusiasm and diligence.